Posts Tagged ‘Olympics’

Remember Obama’s promise to restore America’s “prestige” that demagogue Obama claimed had been lost under President Bush??? I sure do.

Now, five years into Obama’s presidency, America’s restored “prestige” means that even our greatest athletes at their greatest athletic event have to be so fearful and so ashamed of their flag that they dare not display it lest the villagers treat them like the Frankenstein monster and kill them with pitchforks and torches.

The State Department is telling American athletes competing in the upcoming Sochi Winter Olympics to avoid wearing team gear outside the games’ venues amid growing concerns over terrorist threats in the Russian resort town, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The memo, which details steps athletes can take to ensure their safety during the games, cautions them to avoid wearing team colors too prominently outside of the 1,500-mile so-called “Ring of Steel” security perimeter established by Russian security forces.

“The U.S. Department of State has advised that wearing conspicuous Team USA clothing in non-accredited areas may put your personal safety at greater risk,” said the memo, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Designer Ralph Lauren on Thursday unveiled the official uniforms that American athletes will wear to the Opening ceremony. The uniforms feature a knit patchwork cardigan emblazoned with big stars, an American flag, and the Olympic rings.

“A dynamic mix of patriotic references in a classic color palette of red, white and navy defines the Ralph Lauren 2014 Team USA Opening ceremony uniform, which is proudly Made in America,” the company said in a statement Thursday.

Greg Bretz, a member of the men’s halfpipe team, told the Wall Street Journal that U.S. Olympic officials “have told us not to wear our USA gear outside of the venues,” but added, “I have so much faith in the United States and our safety that I’m not too worried about it.”

Concerns about safety in Sochi have prompted some Olympians to tell their loved ones to stay home, however. One of them is Canadian goaltender Mike Smith, who said he doesn’t want to expose his wife and kids to any unnecessary risk.

“They’re not gonna go. It’s not worth it,” Smith told FOX Sports Arizona’s Todd Walsh. “For myself, it’s about thinking if [my wife is] OK when I’m not with her. It’s unfortunate, but it’s just the way it is.”

Meanwhile London retailers are begging the transport system to stop warning about congestion problems, according to Telegraph‘s Graham Ruddick.

Retail chief Richard Dickenson told Ruddick: “We know there is a displacement effect. Instead of normal tourists you get sports tourists, we knew that. But we didn’t expect the impact on the London catchment and commuters.”

London taxi drivers have reported a 20-to-40 percent drop in income this month, with industry representative Steve McNamara calling the Games “a complete and utter disaster.”

Apart from when I was in the Army – and simply unable to watch the Olympic Games – this is the first time in my life that I haven’t watched any of the Olympic Games at all. In the past I’ve watched as much as I could and even been drawn into the frequently media-generated biographies of the athletes that many sports fans find so useless. Maybe it’s because my president has convinced me that America is not an exceptional nation and our athletes are no better than the athletes of any other countries; maybe it’s because of the way the press politicized the Games by demonizing Mitt Romney the way they did; maybe it’s simply because I’ve got an awful lot of oars in the water and simply do not have time to watch the Games unless I give up two other things I’m doing that I think are more important.

All I know is that I have no desire to watch the Olympics. Which means apparently Londoners and I have something in common.

To finish that last paragraph, the Obama administration lies about ABSOLUTELYEVERYTHING. It’s just too damned bad that we’re not living in the days of Cronkite when one lying but honest-sounding liberal could say, “And that’s the way it is” with his propaganda. And now, caught red-handed lying, the White House is forced to admit that yes, Obama is in fact the anti-Churchill who would have sold Britain out to the Nazis the way his hero Neville Chamberlain tried to do and he didn’t want to look at “the Bulldog” who saved the world from socialism.

Well, it turns out that Mitt Romney knows what he’s talking about and liberals are demagogue fools and Romney’s views were more than worthy of listening to:

LONDON – Local students and troops are getting free tickets to the London Games after blocks of prime seats were left empty at some of the Olympic venues, organizing chief Sebastian Coe said Sunday.

Coe responded to widespread criticism after the first full day of competition by predicting that seats left unused, largely by Olympics and sports officials, will stop being an issue as the games move through the preliminary rounds.

“It is obvious, some of those seats are not being used in the early rounds so that’s where we put the military in there. That’s why we have students and teachers in there,” Coe said at a briefing.

He declined to blame Olympic sponsors, whom he had earlier promised to “name and shame” if they did not use their allocations.

Sponsors including Coca-Cola and Visa defended how they used their quotas, which amount to eight per cent of the 8.8 million available tickets, Coe said.

The issue is sensitive for Olympics organizers and British sports fans after hundreds of thousands of people failed to get tickets in an initial public ballot.

“There is not a single person who thinks it is shambolic,” Coe insisted, adding that no one would object to free tickets for military personnel who “stepped up to the mark” this month to help solve a security staffing crisis at venues.

Yet broadcast images of such signature Olympic events as gymnastics and swimming revealed rows of empty seats for qualifying rounds on Saturday. Tennis matches at Wimbledon’s Centre Court were sparsely attended just weeks after the iconic Grand Slam event there was completely sold out.

Army personnel were attending gymnastics sessions Sunday morning at the North Greenwich Arena during down time from security duties.

“There are a whole bunch of the military actually sitting in those seats at the moment. We can and we have moved them in there,” Coe said.

Students and teachers from east London neighbourhoods also will get late calls for free tickets having already been accredited in a planned reallocation program. Some ticket holders will get upgrades inside venues, Coe added.

Some of the blame for the opening day embarrassment was falling on “accredited people” — including the Olympic family, athletes, and some sponsors and media, organizers said.

Coe said it was typical at the Olympics for sports and national team officials to be “dragged to any number of venues,” and be too busy to attend events in the opening days. “I don’t think you will be seeing this as an issue long-term during the games.”

Sponsors, whose legal rights to protect their brand at the Olympics often fuel criticism, also were defended by the organizing committee chairman.

“I am not sure naming and shaming is what we are into at the moment. Sponsors are turning up,” Coe said.

British Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt had said late Saturday that the no-shows probably corporate guests.

“We think it was accredited seats that belonged to sponsors,” Hunt said. “But if they’re not going to turn up, we want those tickets to be available for members of the public, because that creates the best atmosphere.”

Coca-Cola and Visa said they gave most of their allocated seats to prize winners in promotional offers.

Coca-Cola said its competitions allowed people “to choose the event they really wanted to attend.”

“We have also invited some long-standing partners, employees, and customers to attend the Games. We believe that usage levels of our tickets have been extremely high so far,” Coca-Cola said in a statement.

Visa said it made “great efforts to ensure that our ticket allocations are fully used.”

Organizers will continue to offer more opportunities for people to attend Olympics events.

Releasing tickets for walk-up sales allowed about 1,000 seats to be sold for gymnastics on Saturday, and the Wimbledon policy of “recycling” tickets has been adopted.

Coe said almost 300 people saw handball matches on Saturday by buying cheap tickets — 5 British pounds ($7.87) for adults, 1 pound ($1.57) for children — which were handed in for re-sale by the original holders upon leaving the venue.

It’s actually even WORSE than that. They’re not just GIVING tickets to soldiers; they are literally DRAFTING themto go to the Games so London can pretend their games aren’t “disconcerting.”

Spectators sit among empty seats during the men’s Group A volleyball match between Britain and Bulgaria at the London 2012 Olympic Games on Sunday.

LONDON – Britain was forced to bring in military personnel at short notice to provide security for the London Olympics — and has now done the same to help fill thousands of empty seats at several venues despite the massive public demand for tickets.

Many ordinary people who applied for tickets — in what was essentially a lottery – missed out and there were numerous complaints about the allocation process.

But the first day saw rows of empty seats at events including swimming, dressage, tennis, gymnastics and volleyball — according to reports in The Guardian and Telegraph newspapers — to the outrage of many, including U.K. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

Hunt said the sight of so many empty seats was “very disappointing,” according to ITV News. “I was at the Beijing Games, in 2008, and one of the lessons that we took away from that, is that full stadia create the best atmosphere, it’s best for the athletes, it’s more fun for the spectators, it’s been an absolute priority,” he added.

Usually you’ve got to “draft” soldiers to do things like get blown to bits fighting wars.

Gosh, every single liberal media outlet on the planet: THAT’S DISCONCERTING.

While few have said so publicly, there is widespread recognition that a Brown victory in one of the most Democratic of states will go a long way for all Republican candidates, offering the clearest signal yet that voters are rejecting the ambitious Democratic agenda.

“Rising tides lift all boats,” said veteran GOP pollster David Winston, explaining the surge of interest in Brown’s campaign. “No matter where they are, it will be of help.”

“A lot of people would see this as a national race. If Democrats aren’t safe here, they aren’t safe anywhere,” explained Alex Castellanos, a veteran GOP media consultant who advises the Republican National Committee. “You want to surf that wave that’s out there, and I’m sure that’s what Republicans are doing.”

When there’s trouble in Massachusetts, rest assured , there’s trouble everywhere, and they know it. One thing is very, very clear as I traveled across this state. People do not want the trillion dollar health care plan that is being forced on the American people, and this bill is not being debated openly and fairly. It will raise taxes, it will hurt Medicare, it will destroy jobs and run our nation deeper in to debt.

But the same Democrats who couldn’t understand that Republican Scott Brown was winning in the bluest of blue states of Massachusetts can’t understand what the true ramifications of the stunning Republican victory are.

Instead, they are reacting with spin and vowing to redouble their efforts to do the very things that turned the American people against them in the first place.

I turned on MSNBC, and it was amazing.

According to the evening’s propaganda equivalent to a news broadcast: the race had nothing to do with national issues; Martha Coakley was entirely to blame for running a terrible campaign; Barack Obama is still incredibly popular and powerful, and he brought Coakley up by a great deal – but couldn’t make up for Coakley’s terrible campaign; even though the most liberal state in the union didn’t want ObamaCare, the rest of the nation still did; the Brown “forty-one” seat wouldn’t really hurt the Democrats all that much if they rededicate themselves to their agenda; etc.

I have a background in philosophy of religion, and I began to hear what was clearly a liberal theodicy: why does Obama allow evil in the world?

From that starting point, the leftist network began to explain the event of how a candidate running against Obama’s agenda could win a seat held by Democrats since 1952 in the most Democrat state in the country.

After Obama spent his last 2 cents’ worth of credibility campaigning for Martha Coakley, he didn’t fail – HE CANNOT FAIL!!! The fact that he is now something like ZERO for 5 (Olympics, Jon Corzine, Creigh Deeds, Copenhagen/Climate Change, and now Martha Coakley) is nothing more than a coincidence. Clearly, there had to be some other explanation. It couldn’t be that even people in Massachusetts now recognize that Barack Obama is a failure, and that his agenda is a gigantic boondoggle.

It’s not that Obama has shorter coattails than a naked midget; Obama can lower the oceans!

It’s not that people are no longer paying attention to a president who has demonstrated that he is an incompetent loser; Obama could call fire down from heaven if he wanted to destroy his opposition.

It’s not that Obama’s agenda should now clearly be treated by Democrats like kryptonite is treated by Superman; Obama’s agenda is perfect in every way! And if the people hate Obama’s plan for his world, it is only because they are ignorant and depraved in their sinfulness.

Democrats appear to be utterly failing to understand that Scott Brown’s victory demonstrated a referendum on Obama and his agenda – and the people voted a loud “NO!”

They have failed to understand all along.

They repeatedly and continually mocked Tea Party conservatives. They demonized the people who voiced their protests and concerns of ObamaCare last August. They trivialized and demagogued any and all opposition to their agenda, as if all those people were some kind of minor nuisance, rather than the voice of the American people.

And they just got knocked out with one good punch by “Mister 41,” Scott Brown.

For the last 365 days, Democrats have demonstrated that they are like the proverbial lemmings leaping off of the cliff to their political doom. It’s a terrible plan, and everyone pretty much realizes it’s a terrible plan. But, like that poorly-conceived migration route that leads off the steepest cliff in the region, Democrats have to keep pushing and pushing for it.

“Let’s remove all doubt,” said Nancy Pelosi. “We will have health care one way or another.”

The problem is, that single-minded determination to ruin the country against the clearly-expressed will of the people has come home to roost like [Obama’s Marxist, anti-American, racist reverend] Jeremiah Wright’s chickens.

I get the sense that the Obama administration has no idea how to do anything, and no longer even bothers to try to address issues facing the country. Rather, they spend the entirety of every meeting trying to figure out how they can blame the increasing failures plaguing the administration (and in turn, the nation) on one George W. Bush.

Bush is to Obama what Emmanuel Goldstein was to Big Brother. Bush Is The One Who Is To Receive All Blame.

You’d think Obama wouldn’t want to exhaust this well (there’s going to be a LOT more bad economic news, after all, to go with the increasingly bad news in Afghanistan and Iran). But, nope. He’s gonna to keep running to Bush derangement like a baby runs to mama every single time.

Some Chicago officials say anti-American resentments likely played a role in Chicago’s Olympic bid dying in the first round today.

President Obama could not undo in one year the resentment against America that President Bush and others built up for decades before, they said.

“There must be” resentment against America, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said, near the stage where he had hoped to give a victory speech in Daley Plaza. “The way we [refused to sign] the Kyoto Treaty, we mislead the world into Iraq. The world had a very bad taste in its mouth about us. But there was such a turnaround after last November. The world now feels better about America and about Americans. That’s why I thought the president’s going was the deal-maker.”

State Rep. Susana Mendoza (D-Chicago) said she saw first hand the resentment against America five years ago when she was in Rio de Janeiro to speak as a surrogate for then-presidential candidate John Kerry.

“This vote today was without a doubt ridiculously political and mean-spirited,” Mendoza said. “I travel a lot. I was literally nearly killed in Rio three years ago when I was there representing the U.S. Government. I thought we had really turned a corner with the election of President Obama. People are so much more welcoming of Americans now. But this isn’t the people of those countries. This is the leaders still living with an outdated impression of Americans.”

Just gag me with a spoon so I can hurl already.

As HotAir put it, “Copenhagen just a little too far away to have dead people cast a few votes for Chicago…” And too far away for ACORN shenanigans to bail them out, too.

Presidential press secretary Robert Gibbs rejected the notion that the vote was influenced by the United States’ standing around the world.

And, of course, Gibbs doesn’t HAVE to go out and show the White House’s sour grapes. He – along with Obama – have a ton of leftists and lackeys to do the White House’s bidding for them.

It’s funny that the same media that was quite literally stupefied that The One couldn’t win the Olympic games (youtube) –

– was able to recover so immediately as to point out that Obama never really had a chance given that the world still hates that devil Bush. The New York Daily News wrote:

Chicago was never going to get the Olympics. We know that now, and probably should have known it a week ago. Maybe the world doesn’t hate us as much as it did one year ago, but the International Olympic Committee certainly does.

George Bush wasn’t going to get any excuses from the mainstream media unless his people went out and MADE the excuse. And when they did offer an a justifying narrative, it usually got instantaneously dismissed by a media that couldn’t wait to poke every hole they could find in the Bush account. When it comes to Obama, though every failure immediately has as many media narratives as will be necessary to explain away that failure. Their very favorite one can be summed up in two words: blame Bush.

1) The mainstream media is every bit as biased toward the left as Pravda used to be biased toward the Communist Party.

2) Reagan didn’t spend all of his time bitching and whining about how he had inherited every possible scintilla of negative developments on his disastrous predecessor Jimmy Carter. Rather, he manned-up and solved the problems facing the country.

I don’t think that Obama has so much as a molecule of that “spirit of manning-up” in him. Rather, he is a demagogue, from the alpha to the omega. He’s the kind of man who demonized George Bush or Hillary Clinton for pursuing the very same policies that he himself is now pursuing; and he’s the kind of man who said he wouldn’t raise our taxes, and then weaseled around by pretending that his health care tax wasn’t in fact a tax.

Harry Truman had his famous sign that said, “The buck stops here.” Like the bust of great WWII leader Winston Churchill, Obama threw that notion out. Obama has a very different mindset from either of those great leaders. As far as Obama is concerned, the buck stops at Bush — and it won’t stop anywhere else, until something happens that makes him look good.

Hot Air jumped all over this stunningly revealing statement from Barack Obama. I figured I might as well pile on:

Everybody’s watching what’s going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics. Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly the superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business you’re starting to think, “Beijing looks like a pretty good option.”

Ed Morrissey had this to say by way of comment:

Well, as long as you forget about the oppressive Communist government and the lack of freedom and the Internet filtering and the re-education camps … China sounds really groovy.

Does Barack Obama understand the nature of the Beijing regime? The reason that the government can afford all of this spending is that they control the means of production and the wealth of the nation. They can confiscate what they want at will and spend it where they like. And in Beijing, they spent it where the cameras would be pointed.

Unfortunately, most of what the cameras see is just a facade, as Dale Franks points out at Q&O:The Chinese infrastructure that so enthralls Obama remains decades behind that of the US. What infrastructure China manages to build, however, gets its energy from oil and coal, not from wind and solar. China has become the highest emissions nation in the world and shows no sign of slowing itself down over concerns about anthropogenic climate change. In fact, the air in Beijing is so bad that outdoor Olympics events almost had to be moved.

Meanwhile, the regime where Obama thinks the world would love to do business maintains itself through brutal oppression. China blocked access to the Internet for international journalists despite promising to allow full access to reporters for the Games. They arrested reporters covering peaceful protests. And these are the actions they took while trying to make themselves look good.

If Obama wants us to build up American infrastructure, he can start by ending the flow of American wealth overseas for energy. Create hundreds of thousands of jobs by building the American energy infrastructure through drilling in the OCS, ANWR, and interior shale formations. Lower capital-gains tax rates to encourage more investment and generate more revenues (and jobs).

America needs a President who can see past the facades. Obama has given every indication of gullibility, first with his pledge to conduct presidential-level diplomacy without preconditions with regimes like Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, and now in declaring China the place to do business. Obama isn’t at all ready to lead this nation; he’s not even ready to run a business, with thinking like this.

Barack Obama’s statement on China betrays a fundamentally stupid as well as fundamentally amoral understanding of both the economy and the world.

There are people who will disagree with me. And this is the kind of issue that reasonable and decent people can see in different ways.

I love the Olympics. As a lover of sports, and a fan of the catharsis that watching sports provides, I have spent untold hours in my life cheering my American athletes.

But not this year.

This year, I would feel dirty if I were to tune in.

China is one of the worst offenders of human rights on the planet. It has grown powerful wealthy by exploiting its poor underclass with low pay and subhuman work conditions. This country that tramples upon the human spirit is therefore the worst possible place to celebrate the human spirit.

Beyond its forced annexation of Tibet, and beyond the smog that is literally five times worst than the worst polluted cities in the West, China has proven how unfit it is for the Olympic Games just in obtaining and then preparing for the games.

China made a number of promises to secure the Games – and broke every single one. They were supposed to improve their human rights conditions, but their megalomaniacal determination to control everyone and everything pertaining to the games, they have actually become even worse human rights abusers than they were before.

Journalists are finding that thousands of web sites have been disabled. They would have to look to find the wiretaps that have been planted in Chinese hotel rooms.

In my view, having the Games in Beijing is tantamount to celebrating totalitarian tyranny. It is tantamount to selling out our most noble human values in order to either be “politically correct” or to simply appease evil in the name of “inclusion.”

My parents are planning to watch the Games. On their view, they are supporting the athletes. No way would I call the people who instilled my values “bad people.” Like I said, this is an issue over which decent people can disagree.

On my view, watching the Beijing Olympic Games rewards the Olympic Committee and China. Money and the ratings points that produce more money is all these people care about, and the only way to hurt them and force them to not deprecate the human spirit in the future is to hit them in their wallets. Hence, my decision.